WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Drive Review

Final Thoughts

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Pricing

At the time of writing, the WD Purple 6TB Surveillance Hard Disk can be found at NewEgg for $256.99, at Overclockers UK for £214.99, or through Geizhals starting from €251.04.

 

Conclusion

One should never compromise when it comes to safety and surveillance falls within that category. WD’s Purple series is designed for just this task and after seeing it in action, there is little doubt that Purple is a great choice for this. The WD Purple 6TB surveillance hard disk is designed to work in harsh environments as well as always-on scenarios. After all, surveillance isn’t turned off or it loses its point. The WD Purple series is designed for systems with up to eight drives and can support up to 32 HD cameras while doing so.

The real strength of the drive, next to being built on a solid foundation, is the firmware and WD’s exclusive AllFrame technology. It specifically tuned for surveillance security systems and reduces video frame loss. The caching algorithms are tuned for write-intensive, low bit rate, high stream count applications that are typical of surveillance applications and it supports priority change for write allocations and preemptive caching policies as well as TLER & ATA streaming.

On a pure performance level in our benchmarks, we saw the WD Purple pretty much tie with the WD Red in all scenarios, but there were small differences. With a read and write performance of up to 175MB/s when formatted and 225MB/s raw, the 6TB Purple HDD doesn’t need to hide from anyone.

In the past, a lot of people opted for a surveillance class drive instead of an NAS drive even though they were equipping an NAS with storage. That scenario is now a thing of the past and as we can see in the price chart above, these kinds of drives cost the same now. The drives are nearly identical, but they are tuned for different working scenarios. No need to settle for anything other than what you need and that’s one thing you never should do with your security system, settle. It is also quite the bargain in my opinion, getting 6TB storage at £0.03 per GB.

Pros

• Overall great performance
• Great price per GB of storage
• WD AllFrame technology
• Up to 8 drives
• Uo to 32 HD cameras

Cons

• Mechanical drive: higher noise and power consumption than solid state

“WD’s Purple drives are made surveillance systems and that is one place where you shouldn’t compromise. When every frame counts, you’ll want something you can rely on.”

Thank You WD for providing us with this sample